Photomedia kings

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These days photomedia art is as cool as it is meaningful. Take the Kingpins, one of the 11 artists and art collectives selected for the Australian Centre for Photography's 30th anniversary show.

Their three-part video work is not only a canny observation of popular culture and its stereotypes, it's a big, joyful cack in an unpretentious sort of way. Their video work The Dark Side of the Mall features two young women in slim, caramel ball gowns wandering through an ostentatious shopping centre with sticky-tape stretching their faces like homemade facelifts. A pot-bellied security guard with the features of a Neanderthal and a T-shirt declaring the wearer sat through New York visual artist Matthew Barney's mind-boggling film The Cremaster Cycle (another hip cultural in-joke), marauds nearby. These characters are hilarious and grotesque but the resulting work is a wily portrait of the everyday world. Elsewhere, Grant Stevens invites the viewer to feel the present glorifying the past as behind a curtain a series of flashing words on a television screen correspond to the recorded quotes of famous, yet anonymous, rock stars reflecting on their glory days. Rebecca Ann Hobbs continues her photographic fantasies with a group of young people sharing a secret, slightly perverse world of physical games, while Irene Torres brings photomedia right back to a paper, glue and scissors exercise with her multimedia images of photocopied anonymous figures reimagined into a surreally barren landscape.

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Australian Centre for Photography, 257 Oxford Street, Paddington, 93321455, Tuesday to Sunday 11am-6pm, until September 5.

Downcast clowns

Think of clowns and you probably think of merriment and horseplay; of red noses, crazy hair, custard pies and spectacular pratfalls. The odd, sad clown, all downcast eyes and painted tears, might cross your mind but surely nothing so dejected as the bizarre landscape of mournful buffoonery filling Sophie Coombs's latest exhibition. The minute you step out of the lift and into this hushed gallery space the mood is eerily and uncomfortably melancholic. In one corner a large collection of empty liquor bottles is grouped by label and presented like a symbol of achievement. Did a single clown drink all this to make him happy? Is Coombs suggesting that drinking this much alcohol turns you into a clown? It's definitely a deflating sight - this boozy, cluttered corner of benign glass ornaments. Elsewhere, an arrangement of small collage works on wood features abstract glimpses of circus acts with a faded 1970s feel. Men with hairy chests and wide, gold belts tilt back their chins and throw their arms skywards in true showman style. Scratchy magazine cut-outs resemble black cats jumping over a prone body, and there are suggestions of high-wire acts, elephant tricks, glittering ladies and the odd rough-edged clown leering in the background. Everything feels like the party has ended and all the clown-loving children have grown up and become cynical and bored by the reality of age. Or maybe Coombs is playing a joke on us and our expectations.

In the finely executed landscape paintings of Alexander McKenzie it is almost possible to see the moisture in the air and register the warmth in the breeze. In a series depicting mostly lush outdoor scenes in Tasmania, the young Sydney-based painter engenders his oil-on-linen works with such clarity and light that the solemnly beautiful subject matter becomes shocking. The vast, glassy water surface of Cloud Cover glimmers as if an electric light were trained through the back of the canvas, while Lakeland's brittle trees and cottony sky suggest a scene painted onto a window pane facing twilight. Even the tough, green carpets of paddock in The Dry Country glow, as if the clear sky was drizzling its lustre into the flat grass below.